God dang there were some good stories in my two favorite papers the last couple of days.
Good stories get me excited…Can you tell?
First, The Star…
:: Feature writer Don Bradley had an outstanding front-page story about America’s favorite road, Route 66, in Monday’s paper.
People from Europe, Australia and Asia — as well as the U.S. — are expected to converge on Joplin later this week for the “Route 66 International Festival.” It’s the first time the festival has been in Missouri.
I had no idea that the sense of adventure and nostalgia associated with the road had captured the imagination of people overseas, too.
The story was accompanied by a graphic (compliments of Dave Eames) highlighted by images of old travel guides and two maps. One map showed the route from St. Louis down through the southwest part of the state — Rolla, Springfield, Carthage — to Joplin. The other traced the length of the road from Chicago to the Los Angeles area.
Bradley conveyed some excellent information, such as that 85 percent of the original highway, which has been decommissioned, is still in use as city streets and state and county roads.
“These days,” Bradley wrote, “you just have to work a little harder to get your kicks on Route 66.”
…One caveat about the story: The editors chose to run a couple of lame file photos on the “jump.” Too cheap to send a photographer out for a day or two to get some fresh, good photos.
P.S. A little background on Bradley…As a young man, he was a “runner” at The Star, delivering parcels from one department to another. One of the offices where he stopped regularly was that of the late Jim Hale, the first Star publisher after the paper was purchased by publicly traded Capital Cities (later Capital Cities/ABC, Inc.) in 1977. Bradley would chat regularly with Hale’s secretary, June Dacus, and told her of his dream of becoming a reporter. Dacus put in a good word for Bradley with Hale, and pretty soon Bradley found himself working in the second-floor newsroom.)
:: In the first of several stories The Star will run this week commemorating the 40th anniversary of George Brett’s first game with as a Kansas City Royal, columnist Sam Mellinger wrote about Brett’s call-up from Omaha and his first game as a Royal in 1973. (The Royals beat the White Sox in Chicago, and Brett got one hit in four times at bat.)
This story was 62 column inches long, enough to cover about 3/4 of a page. But it read like it was 30 inches. When I reached the end, I couldn’t believe I had read the whole thing, and I looked back to see if maybe I had skipped a column along the way…When a reporter can write a story that reads that fast, he’s really done a great job.
***
On to The Sunday New York Times…
I almost never read the SundayStyles section, although I should, but the cover story about Caroline Kennedy caught my eye and I dove in. In addition to 39 inches of rich, interesting information about Kennedy, whom President Obama has appointed to be the new ambassador to Japan, the story included compelling photos of Kennedy at various stages of her life, including when she was a teenager.
Two of the most interesting glimpses Kennedy that reporter Jacob Bernstein gave the readers were that Kennedy rides the subway in New York and socializes with people all across the political spectrum, including conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch.
***
Having been hooked by the Styles section, I proceeded to read two other excellent stories in the section…
:: Matteson Perry, a Los Angeles-based screen writer wrote about his romance with a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” One of her distinguishing and most alluring features was that she had a tattoo of a phoenix covering the left side of her torso…(Yes, Perry got to explore the tattoo and more.) The story was the latest in a series titled “Modern Love.”
Here’s how Perry summarized the make-up of an MPDG:
Though often perky, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl will be troubled as well. She straddles the narrow line between quirky and crazy, mysterious and strange, sexy and slutty; she is perfectly imperfect. And that imperfection is the key, because a Manic Pixie Dream Girl must be messed up enough to need saving, so the powerless guy can do something heroic in the third act.
(Can we identify with that, fellas?)
The story of the romance, Perry said, was “one I stole from the movies.” Of course, the affair turned sour.
So our story ended, not with credits rolling to freeze our relationship in eternal bliss, but with crying and the division of possessions. (I kept the dining room chairs; she kept the old-timey typewriters.)
P.S. Perry is working on his first book, a collection of dating stories…I’ll be pre-ordering that book.
:: I finish with another fascinating “love” story — about a 59-year-old novelist, Joyce Maynard, and a 61-year-old lawyer, Jim Barringer, who teamed up on Match.com. Each was divorced with three grown children.
Barringer and Maynard…New York Times photo
The story — part of The Times’ “Vows” series — explored their contrasting personalities: He, patient, wry and brilliant; she, a person who lives “with lots of speed and soul.”
They were married on July 6 in a meadow in Harrisville, N.H. The bride and groom wrote their own vows. Part of Ms. Maynard’s vows went like this:
I love it that in your eyes, I am the babe of the universe, although that calls your eyesight into question…So long as I can walk, I will dance with you. I will bake you apple pies and never wear flannel nightgowns.
Let’s hope that this union fulfills the hope and promise we so often see at the end of a movie.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Fitz,
The Route 66 gave you kicks and Brett pieces will be great. Sam writes like that often (to me). The Kennedys have an enigmatic and historic way to pull us in, but marriage vows?
My ex-wife and I divided, instead of remaining married and performing another type of mathematics.
Find please your golf bag.
Jim, I have no plans to read any of the Brett pieces in The Star because I think the paper’s sports section is entirely too big to begin with, and for another, I’m not into hero worship. This is overkill plain and simple. But the Route 66 article looks to be a good read, so “down memory lane” I shall go.
Just wish I had the old ’62 convertible up and running and could take in a minor league baseball game at Decker Stadium in J-Town (Joplin) while leisurely navigating “the Mother Road.” Only 13 or 14 miles of the entire stretch lies in Kansas, but there in Galena one can see an old tow truck that was the inspiration for a talking vehicle that appeared in one of those children’s movies a few years ago. Too bad The Green Parrot (a Galena watering hole) is no longer in business, the building housing it having collapsed a few years ago, as I recall. Still, “Oklahoma City sure looks pretty.” It’s time to “motor west!”
Good to have a Joplin/Route 66 historian in the house.
…I’ve become familiar with the northeastern quadrant of Oklahoma the last several years, as our son Charlie attended and graduated from Tulsa University. (Tulsa is on The Mother Road, of course.) When he first went to Tulsa, a neighbor and longtime friend said, “You know about those Oklahoma girls, don’t you?” And I said, “No, what about them?” And he replied, “They don’t turn you loose.”
Well, Charlie graduated last year and he’s still in Tulsa, partly because his girlfriend “won’t turn him loose.” (Of course, he doesn’t want to be turned loose.)
Interesting country down there, except for the U.S. senators and House members, who won’t turn loose of their backward notion of what’s good for the country.
A fraternity brother and I packed up my 1949, 2-door Plymouth and headed from Cleveland tor Mexico City in the summer of 1951. I was fed up with my second summer as a crane repairman’s helper at Republic Steel in Youngstown, Ohio. Dad said I could take off after I had earned the $600 limit before going on his tax filing. A good portion of the drive was on Route 66. Of course “Interstates” were unheard of but there were US routes like 40 and 50 that went coast-to-coast. The first night is my most vivid memory. We camped in a farmer’s field on a high spot. We slept outside on war surplus army cots.
A near perfect night. The lights of St. Louis twinkled below us. The Cardinals were my team. We had many more adventures and memories. But I’ll remember that night on Route 66.
Yep, nice story. +1
Nice story, Ridge.
As one of Don Bradley’s former colleagues, I can tell you without any hesitation that he is one of best writer/reporters around. One of his best stories was about 20 years ago when he wrote about a woman who was kidnapped and brutally gang-raped after getting off work from her job at Applebee’s. The woman was willing to talk to him and she told him how, during the awful attack, she placed her Applebee’s nametag under the car seat. That turned out to be a key piece of evidence that allowed prosecutors to convict the thugs and send them to prison.
Earlier this year, Don had a wonderful Sunday front page story about a man who became an artist despite being unjustly institutionalized for nearly his entire adult life.
Don also is the last of a dying breed at The Star — a person who rose from the bottom rung of the journalism career ladder to a regular A-1 story producer. I might be wrong, but I don’t think that Don went to any journalism school.
That’s right, Mike…It was long, slow climb for Don. Even when I was working with him in the Independence bureau in 2005-2006, my last stand at The Star, he wasn’t held in truly high esteem. He moved into the top flight as others left or were laid off, and he gained a lot of confidence as a survivor. Instead of being afraid of losing his job, he decided to make himself indispensable, it seems to me.
You can’t bring up Joyce Maynard and leave out her infamous (some would say creepy) affair with J.D. Salinger when she was 18 and he was 53. So now you know.
You’re absolutely right, Harwood…Big oversight on my part. It is referenced in the second paragraph of The Times’ story…
“Ms. Maynard, 59, has taken many big dives and written about most of them: At 19, she dropped out of Yale to move in with J. D. Salinger, the reclusive novelist. The affair ended in 1973, after nine months, which depressed her for years.”